Digital TV, the effect of delay when watching football

Publication

Publication

Hearing a neighbor cheer for a goal seconds before you see it can
be very annoying. Currently, many people that upgrade their TV
service from analog to digital TV are experiencing this. We
briefly describe causes of these (relative) delays. To support this
with practical evidence, we report field measurements of relative
delays from 19 different receivers that show that up to 5 seconds
occurs between technologies like IPTV, analogue cable, digital
cable (both SD and HD), digital satellite, terrestrial and web TV.
We present a controlled experiment that simulates the football
watching experience with 18 participants watching clips in
different rooms cheering over an audio connection. The results
show that delays measured in practice disturb the experience
significantly. Moreover it often took participants little time to find
out if they were ahead or behind. Also many participants felt
inclined to change their service to a provider with less delay. The
results emphasize that delay is a quality factor that needs to be
taken into account and minimized in digital TV. This is crucial for
digital TV providers to entice consumers that want to be the ones
to first cheer for a goal.